Malcolm Wicks: My hon. Friend wants to become one of the centenarians. Indeed, to warm us up for difficult decisions, the DWP is now telling us, courtesy of statistics from the Office for National Statistics, that 11 million people alive today can expect to live to 100. That is an extraordinary piece of demography. I accept the logic, therefore, that most of us should expect to leave the labour market, retire and draw our state and occupational pensions at a later age. However, the main reason for raising this matter in the House today is that this is insensitive to, and has no understanding of, social class variations. There is an assumption that these broad figures about life expectancy apply equally to all of us, regardless of geography, constituency, whether people live in the north or the south, or the kind of work undertaken.
	When I looked at some of these issues in the light of social class, I am afraid that, not for the first time, socio-economic status reared its ugly and unequal head. Nineteen percent-almost one-fifth-of men from social class 7, which encompasses those with routine occupations, such as cleaners, packers, van drivers and unskilled labourers, many of whom have been in work since the age of 15 or 16, are dead before 65. They never live long enough to draw their state pension. That compares poorly with those from the professional and business classes. There is a difference for women as well, but it is not so stark. I question, therefore, whether a one-size-fits-all scheme of increasingly raising the state pension age-the Government now want to consult on raising it even further to 68-is a sensible way ahead in this area of social policy. Furthermore, a second pension penalty is, of course, paid by the poorest men and women in our communities. Although most people from those social classes reach pension age, they enjoy far shorter pension lives than those from the better-off social classes. So a second social pension is paid.
	The arguments for raising the state pension age across the board are based on the assumption that the labour market is sufficiently dynamic and flexible to provide the jobs for those people. Again, however, this ignores social status and the realities of many people's working lives. It can be no coincidence that many who compete in a kind of macho competition to say how late we should draw our state pension-66, 67, 68, why not 70?-tend to be people from big business, the political class or the media, who may be able to continue their working lives almost indefinitely, writing articles, having portfolios, doing consultancy or, if they are unlucky, in the House of Lords. These people might be able to continue their work, but what about the van driver, the bus driver, the woman who cleans offices, the steel workers, the people with creaking backs and aching limbs, who come their 60s need to retire in a very old-fashioned sense?
	The DWP would need to work on the details, but surely we could say that people in those social classes who typically started their working careers not in their early 20s, which will have been the lot of many of us, or their mid-20s, which will be the lot of many of our children and grandchildren with postgraduate qualifications, but at 15 or 16, and who often have worked hard ever since, once they have worked for, say, 50 years-we could check that in national insurance, tax and employment records- deserve a rest, in an old-fashioned sense. They need to retire. Given that the demography shows that those people are, sadly, likely to die four years before the average age, it would surely be only fair and just if they could draw their state pensions four years earlier than most of us.